


somniloquy

by ssstrychnine



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Sleep, Sleeptalking, but not in the traditional sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 11:52:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6152827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>snafu tells sledge secrets while he sleeps</p>
            </blockquote>





	somniloquy

Snafu won’t talk about his life back home. Not because he has nothing to tell or because it’s too good or too awful, just because the guys in boot camp always ask and it’s funnier to leave them hanging. They try because they think he’s strange and they assume his life before was strange too. They give him his name, chaos made ordinary, and he tells them Louisiana ghost stories instead, to keep them awake at night. 

On Gloucester it’s those same men dead, asking him why he’s not with them, if growing up in a swamp could have saved them from the rain.

“Ghosts’re everywhere,” he tells those still living and he tucks himself a little deeper in the mud and shuts his eyes.

Afterwards, on Pavuvu, he meets Eugene Sledge who doesn’t ask him anything. He looks shined clean and green and Snafu doesn’t want him at his back, doesn’t want him anywhere near him, when they get back to fighting. He seems too young for war, though he’s no younger than any of them. Snafu imagines that he bruises easily, imagines a blue-yellow thumbprint at the base of his wrist, and then cuts him out of his head altogether and puts him in amongst the rest; new dead boys.

But he keeps his feet on the coral wasteland that is Peleliu. He keeps his feet and he keeps his head and Snafu thinks perhaps he’s not so doomed as all the rest. Eugene Sledge who is stupid enough to take off his boots when it’s quiet but smart enough to fear what might happen when it gets loud. Eugene Sledge with a pencil and bitten fingernails and a smile that pulls the corners of his mouth down like he’s afraid to use it. Snafu steals teeth and Sledge looks at him like he’s something from a nightmare and he wonders how long it will be until that changes too. 

That day, the first day, on the edges of an airfield, Snafu sleeps in the sunlight. Gloucester had taken the dark from him, like it had taken so many other things, and he finds it difficult to fall asleep after the sun has set. He closes his eyes and he’s drowning. So he takes his four hours in bright sunlight and it’s almost dark when he wakes up. Sledge sleeps next, awkward against the gravel. Snafu watches him settle and unsettle, not yet used to finding comfort in discomfort. He could help him, show him the best way to fold up a poncho for a pillow, how to press your heels into the ground so you don’t slip further into your hole. But Peleliu is different anyway, Peleliu is an open wound, and Snafu lights a cigarette and watches him struggle instead, a clumsy smudge of blue-grey in the dying light. 

The night is not quiet. Something has changed, Snafu can feel it already, maybe he felt it before he was even off the boat. Their enemy is no longer easy to predict, no longer as constant and unchanging as the rain. The night is not quiet, it’s streaked in flares and shredded by bullets and Sledge flinches his way through his four hours. Snafu thinks he ought to tell him something, explain that this is different, that maybe everyone here has been born new to the island, young as he is. But he holds his tongue and smiles and turns his eyes to the sky when Sledge looks his way.

On the second day Sledge saves his life. He is running and then very suddenly he isn’t. He is on his back in gravel and the sky is screaming blue and he thinks his shoulder has been blown off, it has to have been blown off, he’s dead already, a hole cut wide in his flesh. Then Sledge is there, Eugene Sledge with his nail-bitten hands, patting down every whole piece he has left, and then pulling him to his feet and tucking him under his arm and running with him. 

It’s not until they have the airfield that Snafu has time to feel again, something more than anger and fear and burning fast adrenaline. He’s tired, mostly, but it’s dark already and every time he shuts his eyes he can see himself torn to pieces by the mortar that never hit him. There is a Snafu somewhere who was hit, a Snafu who didn’t have Sledge to pick him back up again. Perhaps he even envies him a little, for being done with it all already. 

That night he takes his place up broken stairs because he can see better and because the higher the ground the less likely he is to drown. He watches Sledge talk to Ack Ack about _their war_ , like it’s not the war that owns them body and soul. Maybe not Sledge though, maybe not yet. Something about the way he looks in the moonlight, red and silver under a flare, the way shadows and light sit on his face, makes Snafu want to spill every secret he’s ever kept. He bites his tongue instead and looks up at the moon.

They fall quickly into a rhythm, the stove-pipe boys, and Sledge becomes Sledgehammer and Snafu stays Snafu. It’s a way of splitting themselves up, like the people with those nicknames will die when the war does, like there will be some untouched part of them that they can go back to. Snafu thinks maybe New Orleans is the one place that might be possible. The mud and the blood and the shadowy corners of it. It has a sliver of war down the ridges of its spine. A speck of violence under its fingernails. A crown of death across its brow. A prettier war than the one that holds them by their throats in the Pacific. 

The first night Snafu talks to the air is the night after Ack Ack dies. Sledge is sleeping, not twitching or muttering or dreaming, he knows how to fit in their hole now. Sledge is sleeping and Snafu watches him, the light edges on the buttons of his shirt, the soft skin under his eyes, his knuckles. 

“This ain't summer camp,” he says aloud, before his thoughts can catch him up and stop him. Someone in the dark grumbles a protest. Snafu frowns, licks his lips. His voice is low down in his throat when he speaks next, a rasping whisper. He shuffles closer to Sledge in their foxhole.

“You look same as if you were sleeping in clouds,” he says. “I never slept easy, even at home.”

Sledge sleeps and Snafu moves closer still, until he’s half lying down beside him and he can smell the dirt on his skin. He doesn't say anything more, he feels too much like he’s spilled blood with this small confession. Like Sledge will wake up and tie him in a knot. He holds his gun with both hands, knuckles white against the butt, until four hours are up.

“Sledgehammer,” he whispers, breath stirring his hair, and then Sledge is awake and blinking and nothing has changed.

He tells Sledge a lot while he sleeps. Stories from home, boring facts he’s picked up, boring lies. He talks a lot about sickness, the things his mother thought she had, mould growing inside her lungs, fire in her veins. The things he’s sure he has, impure thoughts, sin and sin and _sin_. He talks about things he could say just as easily with both of them awake and he talks about things he could never say to someone conscious.

“I don’t want a house with a gate,” he says. “I just want a place that’s mine. Some shack with four walls and a mattress. Supposing I get out of here, which I won’t.”

If the rest of their group pick up on these whispered, one-sided conversations, they don't say anything. Snafu draws his voice so thin it’s barely more than mouthed words in the dark. He doesn’t think too much about why he’s doing it, or what pulls his eye to Sledge during the day, or why the thought of him doing something like stealing teeth turns his stomach. He just talks in four hour stretches and then whispers his name to wake him up closer than he ever needs to.

Their stretch in Peleliu wears them out skin and flesh and bone and marrow and talking to Sledge at night quickly becomes the only thing he has. He goes over what he might say during the day, stored up pieces of knowledge he collects when they have a quiet moment. _I feel like a shirt wrung out, Sledge_. _I feel like shrapnel, I feel like I'm missing half the pieces of what make up a man_. He says these things over and over in his head and when he chokes them out a night, barely audible, it's such a relief his bones turn soft and he sinks further into the mud than he means to. 

Peleliu lasts two months and feels like ten years and by the end Snafu has told Sledge more about his life than he’s ever told anyone. Every bone he’s broken, every person he’s kissed. But it still surprises him to realise that he doesn’t like having him out of sight. On the first night he discovers he can sleep in the dark again but he wakes up after four hours with his hands like claws, clenched around a gun that isn’t there. He lies in the dark for a long time, trying to see through it. His heartbeat feels like it will split his skin it’s so loud, so fast, so thick with blood and fear. 

Sledge is asleep in the cot just across from him, an arrangement Snafu had orchestrated. He’s sleeping not dead, asleep not dead, but Snafu can’t hear him breathing and can’t bring himself to turn his head to check. The dark is suffocating and his limbs are concrete and Sledge is dead, Sledge is dead from a fever or some wound inside no one had known was there. Sledge is dead and Snafu doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. 

It feels like hours before he can turn on his side to face him, more before he can sit up. Sledge is a shadow in the dark. Snafu holds his breath as he moves across packed earth and then kneels down beside his cot. He’s not sure what he’s going to do, what part of this corpse he will keep to talk to in the dark. When he sees the pin, the anchor and the world, he grabs Sledge’s collar and his knuckles hit skin, collarbone, and he’s _warm_ but they always are at first, when they’re new to death. 

“ _Snafu_?” comes a voice from the dark, a voice he recognises, and the skin under his hands shivers and stretches and he ignores it and tugs at the pin until it tears out from the collar. “What are you _doing_?” 

Snafu falls back, the pin in his hand, and Sledge is sitting up and staring down at him, frowning, pulling at his ripped collar.

“You’re a ghost,” murmurs Snafu, looking away. His eyes and cheeks feel hot, perhaps he has the fever too. “They’re everywhere.” 

Then Sledge is kneeling in front of him and his hands are on his bare shoulders and he’s pulling at Snafu’s gaze with his own. Snafu can’t remember ever dreaming like this before. He can’t remember a night ever being so quiet. He holds the pin so tight it cuts into his palm. Sledge looks desperate and concerned and his hands are warm and Snafu can’t remember how they got like this. He would never let anyone so close voluntarily, not even the man who saved his life. He pulls away, staggers to his feet, takes the two long strides across the floor to his cot. Sledge is watching him still, he can feel it, and he lies back down, his face to the wall of their tent, and shuts his eyes.

They don’t talk about it. Snafu keeps the pin, considers it in the half light of the evenings. He toys with the idea of pushing it through his ear lobe like his mother had done with plastic pearls, but then he thinks of rust in wounds and bayonets and the square tips of the Japanese swords held high and he changes his mind. It would pull too much attention anyway, knocking against the rim of his helmet. Eventually he fastens it to the inside of one of his cuffs where it rubs against his wrist. He feels Sledge’s eyes on him often and it’s strange, being the one who is watched. At night he wakes up every four hours and he whispers words across the space between them.

“Wake up,” he says. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

All he needs to do is kneel down by the cot again and whisper his name so close he can taste him. All he needs to do is say _Sledgehammer_ and Sledge will be awake and blue in moonlight. But he doesn’t, he just sits on his hands or twists the pin between his thumb and forefinger or thinks of every part of him that hurts. It will be better once they’re fighting again, he decides, it will be better when he’s doing something he understands.

They remain inseparable though, something Snafu does not understand at all. He’s half sure they should have come to blows by now, used their fists to push against the thick air between them, split their knuckles on each others teeth. Instead they sit next to one another at chow and slouch around Pavuvu with their shoulders bumping together and work the same detail, killing crabs or clearing space or rolling barrels. 

On the boats Snafu wakes up more often and he starts to tell stories again though there are more people than just him and Sledge in their sleeping quarters. They hang from the ceiling in hammocks that swing with the waves. Snafu fiddles with the pin at his wrist and tells the stories to the ceiling though they are only meant for Sledge. 

“I broke my collarbone falling outta a tree,” he says, dragging a hand across his sternum. 

“Shut the fuck up, Snafu,” someone else yells, voice thick with sleep, and Snafu laughs and maybe he can hear Sledge laughing too. 

Okinawa is wet like Gloucester and vicious like Peleliu and not at all like either. Snafu is exhausted after only a day there, the cuffs of his dungarees thick with mud, his boots indistinguishable from the soft ground. There is desperation built into the bones of this island and every step they take toward the centre fills him with dread. They keep being sent green boys like kindling to start a fire. But he shares his foxhole with Sledge, who isn’t green, who was _never_ green, and they move together like they’ve been built for it. They are men made of iron not flesh, impervious to bullets and chained together at the ankles. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they can even take a break from bailing. Sometimes they can stop and breathe together. Sometimes Snafu puts his wet hand to the side of Sledge’s face when he wakes him for his watch. 

Stealing souls and gold teeth holds nothing for Snafu anymore. The pocket of the pack he held them in rotted through and they fell away somewhere anyway. He will miss the gold, he will miss what it could mean for him in Louisiana, but that’s so impossible now that it hardly seems to matter. He might have bought dresses for his sisters or a place with four walls, but really they’ll be better off if he doesn’t come home at all. 

They are broken over and over again on Okinawa. Snafu screams at Sledge and Sledge screams back and Snafu aches to touch him because he’s sure that will fix everything. He’s not sure if it would take a touch of love or violence but anything is better than the way they break their teeth on the things they don’t say. Snafu talks in the dark still, to ease the tension, but it is never enough. Sometimes he is sure he sees Sledge move like he has heard part of it, but it is never enough.

“If you were awake I’d bite your lip,” he murmurs one night, just before they’re to swap, and then he leans in closer. “I’d eat you up, Sledgehammer.”

Sledge startles awake and he stares at Snafu for one long, wide-eyed moment and Snafu sways in place and shuts his eyes like perhaps Sledge will do something if he knows Snafu can’t see it. Like perhaps if he’s quiet enough Sledge might pick out what he’d said from his fading dreams. But the time stretches and Snafu opens his eyes again and Sledge is halfway out of their foxhole, digging himself in, getting his head screwed on. Snafu twirls the world and anchor pin at his wrist, flicks it with a fingernail, settles himself down into the hole and shuts his eyes again.

They survive Okinawa but it never really feels real. Pavuvu is filtered through the sun, so beautiful and still and quiet that Snafu doesn’t feel comfortable there. Not in his tent with Sledge, not on the beach or in the sun. He still talks to Sledge while he sleeps but it’s not pieces of his life or splinters of how he feels it’s just the mundanity of leaving war behind

“There’ll be no uniform,” he says one night. “There’ll be things to choose.” 

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” says Sledge.

Snafu doesn’t know what to do. Sledge is asleep, he has to be asleep, it is essential that he is asleep. He has wanted this with everything in him but now that it’s here he can’t seem to move. He twists the pin between his thumb and forefinger. He pulls the dry skin from his lower lip with his teeth. Across the dirt Sledge is sitting up, staring at him. Snafu sucks on his teeth and shuts his eyes a moment and then he sits up too. 

“You’re awake,” he says.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothin’,” he says carefully. “What do you think I’m doing?” 

Sledge laughs, raises his eyes like he’s asking God for help. “I have no idea,” he says. 

“Are you... are you always awake?” he asks and his heart is beating like it wants to escape his chest and holds himself very still, so it might take him a little longer to bolt like he wants to. 

“No,” says Sledge. “Not always. Sometimes. Do you do this every night?” 

“No,” Snafu lies. 

Sledge gets to his feet and Snafu makes a noise, a swift hiss through his teeth, bitten back before it can turn into anything else. He twists his hands at the wrist and then settles them on his knees, pinching at the thick fabric of his trousers. Sledge sits down next to him and Snafu can’t even look at him, can’t even think, can’t even breathe.

“It’s fine,” says Sledge and he puts his hand on Snafu’s shoulder, just like he’d done when Snafu had thought him dead. “It’s _fine_.”

Snafu looks at him finally and his face is calm and his eyes go on forever. They’re so close they’re sharing breath, it would be easy to close the space, Snafu can almost see it happening. If he kisses him he might break it all, get thrown into the dirt, get torn up body and soul. Or he kisses him and it’s all both of them want. But he doesn’t. They just look at one another and then Sledge licks his lips, achingly slow, and Snafu knows, just _knows_ that if he did kiss him he wouldn’t pull away. It’s this that makes him smile, slow and knowing. Sledge sits up a little straighter and Snafu’s smile widens. They’re so close still and moving closer and..

“You gonna keep me up all night, Sledgehammer?” Snafu asks, his voice slick and low and wicked. 

“If you want me to,” says Sledge and that’s almost enough to undo Snafu completely. But he ignores the heat under his skin and the dull, dark thrill at the pit of his stomach, and he turns away and keeps some small piece of power for himself. Sledge sighs and stands and goes to his own cot. Snafu leans back with his hands behind his head and shuts his eyes and doesn’t dream. 

It’s different after that, it has to be different. They’re close to leaving entirely and Sledge and Snafu are closer still. Burgin watches them, bemused, as they bump shoulders, as Sledge’s hand skims Snafu’s waist, as Snafu pushes Sledge ahead of him, his palm flat against his lower back, lingering too long. But he doesn’t say anything. 

On their last night on Pavuvu they leave together. Sledge says something about wanting to sleep on the beach, something to remember, and Snafu follows him. It’s not really the last night, they’ll be on a boat for a long time still, but it feels like something will close forever after this. There is a sunset, red and gold and pink, and everything else is a silhouette. Snafu has the pin in his pocket and he’s rolling it around between his fingers. He’s not wearing a shirt and it’s been hard to leave the pin behind lately, so close to the end. 

They find some stretch of flat beach, palm trees, hidden from their camp. They sit on the sand. Sledge leans back on his hands and squints at the sunset and Snafu watches him, cannot look away from him, digs his feet into the sand. He’s not sure what’s supposed to happen here, away from prying eyes. He’s not sure what it’s supposed to mean.

When Sledge touches him, a hand skimming the warm skin across the back of his neck, Snafu flinches so badly he pulls away. He seizes his hand before he has time to think about it and holds it bone-broke tight and for a moment all there is just the sunset and both of them breathing, stilted and strange. But both of them relax slowly, fall into the way their touching, and the grip they have on each other softens. Sledge moves closer, skin to skin. Snafu wants to kiss his knuckles, wants to hold his face between his hands, wants to promise him something tangible. He doesn’t do any of it. He hums under his breath. 

“You’ll keep that pin?” Sledge asks, his voice cracking, Snafu’s skin cracking. 

“Mm,” he says. “For good luck.” 

“And for me,” Sledge insists and Snafu looks at him. The sun is mostly gone now and he is bruise-blue in the halflight and he looks harried and afraid. Snafu kisses him. He lets go of him, puts one hand around the back of his neck, and pulls him through the air between them, back together. He pulls too hard and when their mouths hit there are _teeth_ but it softens after that. Snafu’s hand at his jaw, his thumb cutting across his throat, and Sledge gets his arms around him and pulls them even closer, tangling their legs together in the sand. 

They break apart when Snafu, trying to climb into Sledge’s lap, over balances and falls. Sledge laughs and Snafu grins and stretches himself out flat, his arms above his head, his eyes shut to the night. Sledge lies down next to him. They hold hands again, just to keep in contact, and Snafu would think it all a dream but he only dreams of blood. 

“You wanna hear about Snafu’s pecker again?” he asks, because it’s the only thing he can think about, staring at the stars. Sledge laughs again and the sound makes something burst inside him, a thousand tiny pieces, like bubbles in champagne.

“Yeah,” says Sledge. “Yes. Not here but...” 

“Scandalous,” says Snafu, drawing the word out like pulled sugar. “And I thought you were a wallflower.” 

They talk about Sledge then, when Snafu finds he has nothing to say about himself with Sledge awake. A big white house and endless lawns and a dead dog. His father’s medicine bag and his mother's pursed lips and Sid’s car. It’s a life that seems about a thousand years away from the war they left, a thousand years away from New Orleans even, a thousand years away from Snafu’s sisters and his mother and their stilt house. It doesn’t matter, they have damp sand and twilight and they fall asleep together on the beach.

Snafu wakes up four hours later, his heart hammering, his palms sweating. Eugene is asleep next to him, like he might never wake up, and Snafu opens his mouth to say something, to talk himself back from the edges of terror. Sledge moves, turns toward him, makes some small sleep sound, and Snafu exhales, shuts his eyes, draws back his shoulders.

“Sledgehammer,” he says quietly, his lips brushing Sledge’s ear. Sledge jerks awake but when he sees Snafu his eyes go soft and he reaches out and pulls him closer and they fall asleep again.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! im @oneangryshot on tumblr if you wanna say hello.


End file.
